Seattle City Light uses three technologies in its meter reading work and in its effort
to curtail electricity theft.
There are all kinds of situations where our meter readers might not be able to reach a
meter: somebody kept a gate locked, or there's a dog in the yard.
If they find themselves in a situation where they can still see the meter, even if they
can't get all the way up to it, they'll pull out a pair of binoculars and they'll read
the meter using the binoculars.
They don't have to estimate what your usage was and you get an accurate bill at the end.
On the current diversion side, there are two technologies that our employees use to try
and detect electricity theft.
The first of these is called the SensorLink Ampstik and this is a device that determines
whether there's electricity flowing down a service line between a transformer and a premises.
In those instances where we find that there is electricity flowing to the house, but it's
not being measured, we have some investigation to do to determine whether there's a problem
with the meter or whether someone has done something to bypass that meter.
We can install, if necessary, what's called the SensorLink transformer meter, and this
is, essentially, just another electricity meter, but it's installed up at the transformer,
so, if we have a situation where somebody has set up a bypass to their electricity meter,
we can tell how much electricity they've been using that hasn't been getting measured at
their meter.
It's been estimated that there's been about 3 million dollars in lost revenue from people
who have bypassed meters or in some other way taken advantage of electricity that they're
not paying for.
These are efforts that we are doing to make sure that, if someone's using electricity,
they're paying for it, because that helps keep prices down for everyone.
For more information or to leave a comment: www.seattle.gov/privacy